Hope
Nemiroff thought she was living the healthiest lifestyle possible. After
being diagnosed with cancer in 1995 and having a tiny tumor removed from
her breast, she had changed her ways. She walked. She went for hypnosis
and did yoga to help reduce her stress levels. She switched to a mostly
organic, vegetable-based diet. She drank a dozen cups of green tea every
day.

Determined to learn everything she could about her disease, Nemiroff,
now 58, also became president of the Mid-Hudson Breast Health Action Project,
an advocacy group in New York. Impressed by her efforts, her oncologist
hired her to help with a study of the relationship between DDT and breast
cancer. Although she was not a subject of the study, Nemiroff says, "I
got curious. I wanted to see what [the blood] of somebody like me would
look like who was living a healthy lifestyle."

Her blood, it turned out, contained traces of DDT. And when she later
investigated what part of her diet might be contaminated with the pesticide,
the answer jolted her. A laboratory analysis found DDT in her green tea.

This finding was especially shocking because green tea has become the
unofficial beverage of choice for breast cancer survivors. Both laboratory
science and low breast cancer rates in Japan, a land of green-tea drinkers,
suggest that substances in the tea might play a role in preventing breast
cancer. Tea manufacturers have capitalized on those theories, labeling
their boxes with statements like "Ancient Healing Formula Teas with Organic
Ingredients" (The Yogi Tea Company) or noting the presence of anti-oxidants
that "help neutralize free radicals ... molecules which can damage cells"
(Lipton). While overall tea sales in the United States have remained flat
during the past decade, cancer concern has propelled the wholesale value
of green tea consumed here from $2 million in 1990 to $25 million in 1999.

DDT, on the other hand, is a synonym for environmental poison. It is
the pesticide that was banned by the United States in 1972, 10 years after
publication of Rachel Carson's landmark book, Silent Spring. Carson

Hope
Nemiroff. Credit: Andrea Barrist Stern.

exposed the pesticide as a terminator, a man-made plague that wiped out
populations of songbirds, trout and salmon, killing them outright or rendering
them sterile. Introduced to the world during World War II as a public
health measure to kill body lice and mosquitoes, DDT was sprayed with
abandon for decades by government agencies and a trusting public who never
suspected it would remain in the environment long afterward. Many now
believe that exposure to DDT is a cause of cancer. Carson herself endured
a radical mastectomy while writing Silent Spring, and she died of breast
cancer two years after the book was published Finding DDT in Nemiroff's
tea raises a number of urgent questions: Was the finding an isolated case?
How did it get there? Did the DDT threaten Nemiroff's health, that of
other breast cancer survivors, or other American consumers? Should people
stop drinking green tea?

An In
These Times investigation has found that Nemiroff's contaminated tea was
clearly not an isolated or rare case. In These Times purchased 10 boxes
of different brands of green tea at a suburban New York supermarket and
health food store, and had them analyzed by Toxicology International of
Fairfax, Virginia. Analysis of the tea samples showed that two of the
10 brands were contaminated with DDT, in violation of Environmental Protection
Agency rules. The one with the highest levels was produced by the Yogi
Tea Company, and included the herbs echinacea and kombucha. However, a
new sample of Alvita Chinese Green Tea, the brand Nemiroff had been drinking,
showed no traces of DDT.

In addition, five of the tea samples contained chlorpyrifos, also known
as Dursban, which the EPA banned from consumer products last June because
of its health risk, particularly to children. Chlorpyrifos is an organochlorine,
putting it in the same chemical family as DDT. Under its recent action,
the EPA reduced the allowable residues of chlorpyrifos in many fruits
and vegetables. But tea is not supposed to contain any of the pesticide,
making any amount of it an illegal adulteration.

These test results mean that consumers can have no assurance that green
tea - or any tea made from leaves of the camellia sinensis plant - is
free of pesticide contamination. But the importance of the findings, say
experts informed of the test results, is that they show the widespread
contamination of our food supply and the environment.

The pesticides were found in tiny amounts, in parts per billion, and
pose no imminent health danger. DDT accumulates in our bodies and is carried
in breast tissue, so ingesting contaminated tea is certainly undesirable.
But the experts say that the benefits of drinking green tea probably outweigh
the risks.

How
did the DDT get in the tea? Surprise: DDT is still being manufactured
in China and India and used in more than two dozen Third World countries
in Africa and Asia. China is the source of most of the green tea imported
into the United States. Finding DDT in tea imported from China would not
surprise Janice Jensen, a senior environmental chemist in the EPA's Office
of Pesticide Programs. "They're still producing DDT in China," she says,
"and there is still some use of DDT there. DDT is caught in the atmosphere,
and can be redeposited far from its use site - that's one of the arguments
for the global treaty on persistent organic pollutants."

This proposed international treaty is the focus of intensive efforts
by the United Nations and environmental organizations, and it is still
being negotiated. (The United States government says it supports the treaty,
but environmentalists have criticized U.S. efforts to water down provisions
that they and the European Union support.) The overall goal is to reduce
the use of, or eliminate entirely, 12 particularly hazardous chemicals
called "persistent organic pollutants," or POPs, including DDT. But several
developing countries are balking at a DDT ban because until effective
and affordable alternatives are available it is their best weapon against
mosquitoes that transmit malaria, one of the world's top public health
problems. Although environmentalists urge the use of safer alternatives,
DDT is cheap and readily available. The affected countries simply cannot
afford other control methods, and the United States has not made combating
malaria a top spending priority.

But it turns out that the actions of people in China and Africa, taken
to protect their health from an immediate and deadly threat, have a direct
impact on the purity of the American food supply. According to Clifton
Curtis, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Global Toxics Initiative,
"DDT is such a potent chemical that as long as it is used anywhere in
the world, nobody is safe."

Six billion pounds of DDT have been produced and used since its introduction
in 1942, more than any other pesticide. In years past, it was sprayed,
often in a sticky oil mixture, on farmlands, forests, rivers, estuaries
and even the Long Island suburbs of New York City (which today have very
high rates of breast cancer). The purpose of that suburban spraying effort
was to wipe out the gypsy moth, and it was a failure; the insects periodically
re-appear in the Northeast in numbers so large that you can hear them
eating the oak trees bare.

Because DDT persists in the environment for decades, it is literally
everywhere and in everybody. The average level of the pesticide in human
fat is seven parts per million. DDT and its metabolite, DDE, have been
found in every sample of breast milk tested, from the Arctic to South
Africa - where children receive DDT in their mothers' milk at rates five
to 18 times higher than recommended by the World Health Organization.
The fact that the WHO even has calculated an "acceptable" daily intake
of DDT testifies to the extent of DDT pollution.

In the United States, a 1992-1993 study by the Food and Drug Administration
found that 5.6 percent of commonly consumed fruits and vegetables that
it tested were contaminated with illegal pesticides. Todd Hettenbach,
a pesticide policy analyst with the Environmental Working Group, says
that even crops grown in the United States, where DDT use stopped almost
30 years ago, continue to show DDT contamination. Squash and root crops
like carrots are a particular concern, he says.

With imported food, the situation is worse. A 1994 report to Congress
on food safety by the General Accounting Office (GAO) noted that countries
which export food to the United States need not, except in the case of
meat and poultry, have monitoring systems equivalent to ours, and that
U.S. agencies often lack information on chemicals used by exporting countries.

Richard Liroff, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Alternatives to
DDT Project, says his organization had queried the Chinese government
to find out how much DDT is both produced and used there. "We got no response,"
he says, adding, "Even though it is widely believed that there is diversion
[of DDT intended for public health purposes] to agriculture, we have nothing
more than anecdotal evidence."

Technically,
EPA rules make the presence of any DDT in food illegal. But recognizing
the reality of worldwide contamination, the agency has set "action" levels
for the presence of DDT in meat, fruits and vegetables. These levels are
in parts per million, amounts far higher than those found in the tea.
Only when the action levels are exceeded do either the U.S. Department
of Agriculture or FDA take steps to find the source of the DDT and try
to retrieve the food before it gets to market.

In 1994 the GAO reported that 3 percent of the imported food shipments
tested by the FDA contained prohibited pesticides. It said that even when
detected, about one-third of the contaminated food probably found its
way to store shelves. "It is very hard to seize contaminated products
once they leave the border, very hard to track them down," says Jay Feldman
of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides.

Devra Lee Davis, an epidemiologist and toxicologist who was a presidential
appointee to a government chemical safety board, says that "having been
in the government, I understand that this is too big a problem for the
government to solve. It will take the private sector organizing itself
to provide assurance to the public" that imported food is pesticide-free
by testing their products. The Environmental Working Group has suggested
that food importers adopt an approach to food safety that would establish
critical control points for quality testing. The private sector would
do the testing, and the FDA would police that process.

But tea manufacturers insist they do test. "This is the first time anyone
has found anything in our tea," says Jagat Joti Khalsa, director of communications
for Yogi Tea, upon learning the results of the tea analysis. He describes
a systematic and elaborate process of constant testing of tea and herbs
bought from 40 or 50 vendors, which he says costs the company more than
5 percent of its profit margin. Most of the company's green tea, he says,
comes from organic tea estates, primarily in India.

The other tea contaminated with DDT was Stash Premium Green Tea. Joy
Edlund, a spokeswoman for Stash, calls the finding "really strange." She
says the company's premium green tea is grown in Brazil on virgin land
never before used for agriculture, "so DDT was never used on it." She
adds that the company's farming practices are so natural that it has been
contemplating marketing the tea as organic. She says Stash does not test
its tea for purity itself; they import the tea from Brazil.

Both Edlund and Khalsa asked for the tea used in the tests to be sent
to them for their own analysis.

Among
many breast cancer activists and some scientists, there is a strong belief
that past and present small-scale exposure to DDT is the cause of at least
some breast, prostate and other kinds of cancer. But not all the evidence
is clear. A 1993 study showed that women with malignant breast cancer
had higher blood levels of DDT than women without the disease, but it
has been difficult to really nail down cause and effect. A May 1994 toxicological
profile of the chemical prepared for the U.S. Public Health Service noted
that studies of workers exposed to DDT in the workplace "do not indicate
conclusively an association" between DDT exposure and cancer.

Yet the same document notes that studies "suggest that DDT may cause
damage to human chromosomes" and that studies in rats show it to have
"estrogen-like" effects. This is of particular concern because one of
the few generally accepted risk factors for breast cancer is exposure
to estrogen or estrogen-mimicking substances, called xenoestrogens. Studies
show that estrogen and xenoestrogens bind with receptors in mammary glands,
and in the lab xenoestrogens have been shown to make human breast cancer
cells grow. The longer a woman is exposed to estrogen - either naturally,
through early menstruation or late menopause, or, it is theorized, from
exposure to estrogen-mimickers - the higher her risk of breast cancer.

It is on the basis of its estrogenic properties that Janette Sherman,
a physician and author of Life's Delicate Balance: Causes and Prevention
of Breast Cancer, is convinced that DDT is a cause of that disease. "You
[eat] one part per billion today," she says, "and one tomorrow, and at
the end of the month you have 30 parts - these chemicals accumulate in
the fat. DDT breaks down into DDE, which has been shown to be estrogenic
in multiple animal tests going back to the '60s." She adds: "It's nice
to call [the studies] equivocal, but it's not that way at all."

Because she knew about these studies, Hope Nemiroff decided to act after
her blood test showed higher than average levels of DDT. She spent 22
days undergoing a detoxification regimen designed to purge chemical poisons
from the body. The regimen included a run followed by more than four hours
a day of sweating in a relatively low-temperature sauna. The regimen seemed
to work. Her DDT blood levels fell from 0.9 parts per billion before the
regimen to 0.3 parts per billion after.

But six months later - during which time she had been eating her organic
diet and drinking green tea-she was rocked by the results of another blood
test: Her DDT levels had risen to 1.1 parts per billion. When a test of
her water found it clear, she had the tea tested and discovered that it
was, indeed, contaminated.

Should
people stop drinking green tea because of these findings? Green tea is
no different from other teas in that it comes from the camellia sinensis
plant, which grows best in the tropics at high altitude, where the days
are warm, rain is ample, and the nights are cool. What makes the final
product green tea, as opposed to black tea, is only the manner of processing.
Black tea leaves are subjected to a period of high heat and humidity,
during which the tea oxidizes and turns from green to brown. Leaves for
green tea are subjected to a shorter or somewhat different heating process.
As a result, green tea retains a class of chemicals called catechins,
which may play a role in cancer prevention and be part of the explanation
for lower breast cancer rates in Japan.

Davis, who has written extensively on breast cancer and the environment
and expects to publish Nemiroff's case in a scientific journal, did not
advise her to stop drinking green tea. Davis would not recommend other
women give up the beverage either. "There is a lot of benefit to drinking
green tea that has been shown experimentally," she says.

Sherman, author of books on breast cancer and chemical exposure, agrees
that people should not stop drinking potentially beneficial green tea
because of the DDT findings. What those results illustrate, she says,
"is that our entire food supply is now contaminated worldwide because
of massive use of pesticides."

As Nemiroff has done, consumers can try to avoid drinking pesticides
in their tea by switching to brands certified as organic, although this
is not an absolute guarantee of purity. Eating organically grown fruits
and vegetables - which are more expensive than non-organic - can also
help minimize pesticide exposure. Losing weight also releases pesticide
residues stored in fat, eliminating them from the body.

But Nemiroff's story illustrates that it is virtually impossible to completely
avoid food contaminated with pesticides even when someone goes out of
her way to try. Pesticides, wrote Carson three decades ago, are "as crude
a weapon as the cave man's club," a chemical barrage "hurled against the
fabric of life."

"The contamination of our world," she continued, "is not alone a matter
of mass spraying. Indeed, for most of us this is of less importance than
the innumerable small-scale exposures to which we are subjected day by
day, year after year. Like the constant dripping of water that in turn
wears away the hardest stone, this birth-to-death contact with dangerous
chemicals may in the end prove disastrous."